Advice on Using International Futures Historical Data:
How to Compare your country, your region, and the world

Here is an example of a useful comparison of an important variable that you get from the IFs data and use in your country study:

You will not be able to produce a single chart the contains your country, region and the world.  First you have to produce your country chart and then you will have to go back and hit the "Use Groups" option to produce a chart with your region and the world.  You will therefore have two charts in a comparison like this.

Notice that there are certain things you can do to make the country, region, and world comparison easy for your reader to understand:

• use a "table" to place your charts side-by-side
  
• label the charts in a similar fashion.
• set the minimum for your  "y" axis to be "0" percent for both charts.
• set the maximum for your "y" axis at the same point (in this case about 113) for both charts.

1. Open up "Country Data Analysis" and click on the "analyze across time" option.
2. In the "select dependent variable" pick the variable you want to analyze
   
3. Click on the "Select Countries" box, choose your country, and exit.
4. Click on the "Plot" box.  A line graph will appear.  You want to produce a correctly labeled 5 year bar graph of your country's population size from 1960 to 2000. 
5. Right click your mouse and choose the "Customization Dialogue" option. You are now ready to produce you customized graph.  In the Main title box type in an appropriate title and do the same for the "Sub Title" box.
6. Hit the "Plot:" tab and, in this case, choose "bar."  Hit the "Points" tab and choose "selected" (not sequential) and then, holding down the "Ctrl" key, choose five year intervals from 1960 to 2002 -- 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, etc. should be highlighted.  
7. Choose the "OK" option and a correctly labeled 5 year bar graph should now appear.  For ease of analysis do one more thing -- put the actual population size numbers under each bar.  You do this by right clicking your mouse on the graph, going to the "Graph and/or Table" option and choosing the "Graph with Table" option.
8. You can set the minimum and maximum for the "y" axis" by hitting the "axis" tab when in the "Customization Dialogue" option. 
   
9. Finally, hit the "Save" menu, click on the "BMP" option and click on the "Export" box.   This will copy your chart into the Window's clipboard.  Then go to the start menu and go to "Programs," and open "Microsoft Word."    Then go to "Edit" and "paste" the graph into this Word document.  You have now inserted the chart into a Word file as a picture.  You should save this file to a USB drive, or email it to your seld.  When you have all your needed charts in this file and can actually write your commentary in this same file -- just write your analysis  under the appropriate graph(s).  You can always easily "lift" charts from a Word file and later insert them into a web page.
10. After selecting "Choose Groups" produce a similar chart for your region and the world.